• This poor duckling was going to be put down following an accident that left him with a fractured leg, but his owner enlisted the help of a local cobbler and ended up with an adorable corrective sandal. •

• Olympic gymnast Nastia Liukin has big plans for the 2012 games. "Just because I accomplished the biggest thing in gymnastics doesn't mean you have to call it quits. I still have the desire and motivation to accomplish bigger things. I know I have that opportunity to accomplish something that's never been done before. It's pretty amazing," she told the New York Times. And whether or not Liukin manages to grab another gold, we will certainly be seeing more gymnastics on television, thanks to a deal recently struck between USA Gymnastics and NBC. • Thanks to the ACLU, peace activist Sally Ferrell will now be allowed to teach students at the Wilkes Country high school in North Carolina about peaceful alternatives to joining the military. For years, Ferrell had been barred from the school by a board that called her activities "unpatriotic." • Inexplicably, men want to wear swimsuits that look like Bruno's lederhosen. "I sold 20,000 of them in just eight weeks," says an Austrian inventor. • It took much longer than usual for Chinese officials to check the IDs of a group of women returning from South Korea — because they'd gone there for plastic surgery, and didn't look like their passport photos anymore. • A survey says the average woman spends 16 months of her life crying. • To help you make your quota: Euna Lee says her daughter "is still a bit nervous about mommy going to work again. She told me today 'Mommy, when I ask you to leave (she meant 'come home'), please come home to me.' She told Doorie (one of my cats) 'Doorie, if you don't listen, mommy will go to the airport.' " • A Planned Parenthood in Spokane, Washington is accused of requiring unnecessary office visits, thereby charging Medicaid an extra $630,000. • The average age of first-time motherhood is rising around the world, to 25 in the US and 29 in Japan and Switzerland. • A Canadian woman who stabbed her husband to death was acquitted of manslaughter because of his "inescapable" abuse. • Dr. Sami David believes that IVF is being overused by lazy doctors. He suggests that part of this is due to sexism and ageism: "Once again, 40 percent of infertility is male factored. So why is the woman being pumped up with the drugs to correct the male factor?... bottom line is you should be seeing the man, sending him to a specialist. And frankly, that's the sexism." •